I love my NS1. The only thing that is a bit of a challenge for me is that it is kind of hard for me to see which pin is which exactly. The pin itself is about 1.5 cm above the circuit board, where the labels of each pin are printed. I lean over the NS1 and I close one eye and sometimes I’m still confused.

I finally found an easy solution to this problem. I got a silver Sharpie magic marker, and I used it to mark the tops of the pins of every other block of functions. I would show you a picture, but I can’t paste a picture into this message. I wind up with a square silver box around each pin that I’m marking on the top edge of the header.

So, e.g., starting from the top left, I silvered the tops of the header around the pins for CV1 and CV2; I left the four numbered voltage pins black, then the first ADDSUB block (3 pins) is silver, then the next block (3 pins) is black, and so on. This makes it much easier to know where I’m going. I don’t have to wonder, “now which pin is the triangle wave output? is it this one or that one?” Having done this, now I can patch about twice as fast as I could before.

I thought about doing this with fingernail polish, but a Sharpie is much better. Fingernail polish might drop down into your pin and clog it up entirely. A magic marker’s ink has almost no volume, and since the inside of the top of the pin is beveled, you can stay entirely on the surface of the header itself.

I’ve always wished I could have different colored knobs, just so that I can easily tell the difference between the ADSR and the LFO and so on. The silver Sharpie helped me with that too! I silvered the tops of six knobs: the Osc pitch and PW, the LFO’s, and the Filter frequency and resonance. Now all the knobs are easy to tell apart.

You might want to mark things differently. Just do what makes sense to you. Let me know if you have come up with another (or maybe better) way to make your NS1 more personalized and/or easier to use. Thanks!